Posts Tagged ‘Reading’

We’ve taken the luggage down to get ready for an about-a-month-long visit Back East.

We have our house sitters lined up and calls made to credit-card companies to let them know we’ll be on the road and alerted the alarm company, cops, relatives and neighbors so all we have to do now is decide what color slacks and tops we want to take. And how many.

We’re traveling in middle of summer — ugh — the unpredictable-weather and busiest-travel time of year to attend brother Lou’s 75th birthday. We agreed several months ago we’d attend his and he’s to attend my 80th later this year. We’ll be in Toronto for a few days for the festivities, drive to visit Bev’s folks in the Reading, Pa., area for a week, and back to Toronto to hang around with Lou and Jean, play some cards, sip some scotch, drink some wine, and snag a table in some of Toronto’s fine restaurants. In Pa., we’ll do our usual shopping at the Bethlehem of outlets — at the Vanity Fair complex in West Reading — and get our Amish-food fix at one of the several such eateries peppered over the rolling countryside.

We don’t worry about gaining weight during these sessions because we do a lot of walking. As those of you who are familiar with the cities back there, they’re more conducive to walking around than the stretched-out metros of the Southwest, like Phoenix and San Diego and Los Angeles, where it’s normally long-haul to walk anywhere from where you are.

As always, we anticipate a fine R & R (relatives and reminiscing) time but do not look forward to the airport and airplane crunching and scrunching both going and coming. But the excitement of being there and enjoying the folks is beginning to build. And we’ll take a few photos to accompany the travel pieces we write when we return home.